AA|LA is pleased to announce Red, White & Blue, the gallery’s inaugural exhibition featuring new works by Tyler Healy. The show’s large scale prints and accompanying installations advance Healy’s ongoing exploration of digital media and semiotics. This is the first of three exhibits in a series that materializes the artist’s seminal artwork, www.tylerhealy.com. The title is derived from the chromatic pattern presented in the website and Healy’s previous exhibitions that focused on color.

Concentrating on various expressions of climate, time, and imagery, Red, White & Blue proposes an arbitrary yet profound relationship between the digital and material worlds. A single image from Healy’s website is printed on each acrylic plastic panel, revealing the exaggerated compositions and aesthetic translations of digital reproduction. Originally from a series of close-up photographs taken by the artist with his phone, the images exist between abstraction and representation. Healy employs this visual perspective to purposely obscure reality, ridding the subjects of contextual significance.

Healy connects the digital images to the quotidian by overlaying a subtle passage of text in clear ink. Taken from The Old Farmer’s Almanac, the yearly reference periodical published since 1792, the texts are the individual entries on the date its corresponding image was uploaded to www.tylerhealy.com – e.g. the image uploaded on Saturday October 25, 2013 has accompanying text from that date. Each entry, presented as abbreviated phrases and symbols, has different combinations of information related to periodic occurrences such as coastal tides levels, lunar cycle phases, important Christian holidays, inspirational quotes, random celebrity and historical facts. As an expression of the underlying yet unnoticed semiotics of everyday life, this compact writing system has fascinated Healy, whose working class upbringing in a seaside suburban town and background in product design has made him attuned to iconographic languages.

The resulting image and text combinations produce a complex and nuanced representation of science, facts and media. While associations can be drawn between the website’s photographs and the almanac’s passages, the ultimate conclusion is that time is the only real substantive link as the image is otherwise unrelated to its parallel content. Thus Healy subversively and playfully asserts the simultaneously meaningful and inconsequential qualities of the graphic characters that express real life phenomena.

While the focus on blue highlights the color’s diverse aesthetic and symbolic qualities, the choice to eliminate the red and white is otherwise superficial. As such, Red, White & Blue imitates the works it presents and promotes the paradox that notions of consequence and insignificance concurrently exist between imagery and life.

Tyler Healy lives and works in New York, NY. He has exhibited extensively at various galleries including TEMP Art Space (New York City), Ed Varie (New York City), Bleecker Street Arts Club (New York City), Auto Body (Bellport), Museum Dhodt-Dhaenens (Belgium), and South Florida Art Center (Miami). Red, White & Blue is Healy’s first exhibition in Los Angeles.

Red, White & Blue is AA|LA first exhibition. Founded by Alex Ahn, AA|LA Gallery promotes the careers of emerging artists by fostering creative discourse and experimentation. Ahn is returning to his hometown to establish this new endeavor after several years managing TEMP Art Space in New York City.

Special thank you to Ari Lipkis and Aria McManus.